Hmm. Interesting take. Not sure I buy it, though. Where I live every third car is a Mercedes, Lexus, Infinity, Volvo, Porsche, Audi or {shudders} Cadillac. At least once a week I see a Mclaren, Maserati or other super car drive by my front door. This is one of the wealthiest areas in the country and having a prejudice about people’s status based on their cars is pointless. Our very famous actor friend drives a boring minivan with cloth seats. Other unrich friends of ours drive baller cars. Driving a BMW has little to nothing to do with wealth, but it does seem to be correlated to selfishness. Every damn time I see someone parked across two spots, it’s a BMW and more likely than not, a depreciated one. The Army was packed with young dudes who spent their entire paycheck on depreciated Beemers and they were always the ones parking two across.
Most base model Subarus are less than $30k. They have all-time all wheel drive and the best safety record per dollar. There is no better affordable family vehicle for the mountains and snow. Used Subarus sell for more because they retain their value. My idea of “fun to drive” means not having to worry about sliding off a mountain road.
Could it be an Army thing and not a BMW thing? It’s always worthwhile to check one’s assumptions.
My BMW wagon has all-wheel drive, goes like it’s on rails in the snow, and gets 42 MPG. It cost me $24K with 28K miles. Comparable Subarus were selling above that, and aren’t nearly as comfortable, safe, or fun. But the Subarus are head and shoulders above for virtue signaling.
My twenty-something son has both a depreciated BMW and a depreciated Subaru. Not sure what virtue he’s signaling but he enjoys driving both for different reasons.
No kidding. The idea that people that drive certain cars drive a certain way, or are a certain way, is ridiculous. Yet these comments are full of assertions that BMW drivers are this or that way, which makes exactly as much sense as my father’s deranged comments about black drivers. I thought that poking fun at Subarus would raise some hackles, and highlight how stupid this all is.
As far as safety ratings go, the way the car is equipped has a lot to do with how safe it is. You’d have to compare car to car, and I don’t think your ‘no way’ statement is remotely correct.
Can’t say I haven’t done the same thing when I was late for Mother’s Day… When you have to choose between the gift or the switch… you put that pedal to the metal.
As a current NJ resident, I can confirm. I was stuck in a long line of cars the other day because there was an accident up ahead, and the driver behind me laid on his horn. What the hell did he expect anyone to do? This is not the first time this has happened, either. If you drop below 5 mph above the speed limit for any reason for more than a nanosecond, someone will honk at you here.
I don’t think that’s true. BMW’s are aspirational and a significant step up from “base” vehicles that the aspirational may encounter, especially when it comes to performance. The fact that this may embolden them to behave differently is, IMHO, a pretty straightforward behaviour to expect. It’s not every driver, but I even know family members who, upon purchasing a base BMW (for whom it was a big enough deal that the whole family had to go out to “see” it when they brought it to a family gathering) remarked that “now I can blow by slow people!”, in that the behaviour may now be self-propagating.
I notice you mention you are a BMW driver. It’s important not to internalize these sorts of things, any more than my sister, named Karen, had learned to blow off the negative connotations being “a Karen” now has in the world. The post, and the article, after all, is not about you.
I’ve driven cars from at least a dozen different makers, (even Subaru), and liked and disliked things about all of them. I don’t identify as a BMW driver, any more than I identify as a Merrell wearer, when I happen to have a pair of those shoes on. I think that some people probably get giddy when they buy certain types of car, but there are a lot of those kinds of cars, from Chargers and Mustangs to the more butch styles of pickups, and on and on. I just think it’s a bit silly, when there are countless examples of bad, dangerous, dumb, and criminal driving available, that when it happens to be a BMW, it’s ‘oh, look what the BMW idiot did,’ when the car make rarely if ever gets a mention when a gentleman or lady does it in another model, posted on BB. Then everyone piles on with 'yeah, them BMW jerks. So, while there is no shortage of entitled, bad drivers in BMWs, I think the perception is way out of whack, and a way of ‘othering,’ which I find distasteful, like I do any other knee-jerk prejudice, and that is all I was trying to get at in my first post, and apparently didn’t make my point cogently enough to avoid a cascade of responses that ended up far afield.
I rode a bicycle as transportation from childhood to 36 or so, and I was a courier in DC for 8 of those years. In my experience, over that time, the most dangerous vehicle classes to me were a) pickups and SUVs, and b) “luxury” sedans of every type (anything from nice Hondas to Lexuses and German supercars). The risk multiplies by 100, of course, if there’s a spoiler or faux racing stickers -.-’.
Years later, I haven’t seen a damn thing to change that assessment yet.
With acknowledgement of confirmation bias, and anecdotal != randomized sample in a big longitudinal study:
In Austin[, Texas], and in my own circle of friends:
a cook from the Magnolia Cafe West was biking home and was run off the road by a pickup truck late at night on the South Lamar bridge, before the city built a pedestrian bridge; he died of multiple injuries; witnesses were not able to get a license plate number, just general description of an American-make-model pickup, but they said it seemed like they were also throwing things at him before the truck actually hit him;
a Texas state legislation reviewer who worked at the Capitol was on his moped when he was run off the road by a Chevy Sububurban (hit and run but witnesses took down her license plate number); he spent a lot of time in the hospital but escaped brain damage (he had worn a Bell helmet) and wound up taking early retirement because of his injuries; and
an MD (clinician) has been hit three times in the past 11 years, he says intentionally, like the drivers were hunting him; two times these were drivers of pickup trucks, one time it was some kinda sports car; he’s ok, wears a decent helmet, and has had a lot of broken bones BUT continues to bike to and from work every day.
Same here in SoCal. As far as I’ve seen, same thing with many Tesla drivers. They must, they have to, they cannot live without hyper-accelerating to the next stop light or sign. or else what’s the point.
